Aju Business Daily

SEOUL -- SK Materials, a unit of South Korea's SK Group, has agreed to set up a joint venture with JNC, a Japanese chemical company, for the production of organic light-emitting diode materials. The South Korean company hopes to secure core technologies, develop next-generation OLED materials and secure customers in South Korea and abroad.

SK Materials will control 51 percent of the joint venture tentatively named SK JNC, with the remainder to be owned by JNC. The joint venture will have a research center at Dngtan, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Seoul. Their factory will be built in South Korea.

The joint venture will combine SK Materials' production capability and sales network with JNC's original technologies especially in blue dopants used in OLED layers to create a high synergy effect.
A dopant is a trace of impurity element that is introduced into a chemical material to alter its original electrical or optical properties. Japanese companies have a number of patents related to blue dopant.

South Korean companies have tried to reduce their dependence on Japanese key materials used for the production of semiconductors and displays. SK Materials, the manufacture of special gas used in semiconductor, liquid crystal display and solar cell manufacturing processes, has built a production facility to localize hydrogen fluoride, also known as etching gas, which is used to wash away foreign substances in the process of piling up silicon wafers.